A Gilded Planet

To Live 1994.  125 minutes. China. Directed by Zhang Yimou. Watchdate: 9/21/2011. In To Live , Zhang Yimou uses the magic incantations of puppetry intermingled with the proletarian instinct for survival to enchant and animate a story built from layers of dramatic irony and historical circumstance. The scenes featuring shadow puppetry are imbued with a lively, raucous joy. Their imagery is mysterious and sensitive and there’s a real sense of melancholy when the puppets are threatened (and finally lost) during the Cultural Revolution. Other striking moments for me included the abandoned battlefield that Fugui and Chungsheng wake up to after the Nationalist retreat followed by that terrific shot where the Communist army literally engulfs them. I would also single out those shots when Fugui’s daughter looks at herself in the mirror wearing Maoist garb and ponytails, seeing herself as a potential wife with this completely different sense of beauty.

Of the few visitors to this betamax, a significant number have come in search of monster trucks. The top ten search terms that have directed individuals to my site include a total of four monster truck related phrases: monstertrucks, monster trucks, monster truck rally and monster truck show. Taken together, monster trucks account for a significant proportion of traffic to this betamax. All of this is due to a offhand joke I made about Harry Potter. I used a monster truck image to illustrate the joke. But given these analytic results, I have decided to give the people what they want: A Gilded Planet is a proud sponsor of the Demolition Derby. All rights reserved.

Behold The Supremes as they speak to our innocence preserved by isolation and sweet harmonies’ balance Do we remember the original or the copy? Are they the same? the fake fake or poplar tree name brand memory game Finding a reference book after the apocalypse I feel as if I'm getting lost in these depths Watching the parody before the target You should feel no need to explain the Monet She flew the bomber at night when no one could see Poisoned by the singing yawn of manly responsibility A feminine violence unknown to the little dudes Outside of wartime without fasting or feuds I sing of the bodies undeadened by goblets They walk near cars that ride on the couplet Some call them zombies - oh no they are right We view them anothering from our Dreadnought in hardware honey dew guarding our youth we discorporate our voices as a goof The baby, the farting and the earthquakes The zombies, the children and the urn cakes

Nostalgia for the Light 2010. 90 minutes. Chile. Directed by Patricio Guzmán. Watchdate: 5/19/2011 Patricio Guzmán explores the mysteries of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, where astronomers can get a better view of the stars than anywhere else, where the bereaved search for the preserved bodies of Pinochet's victims in the shifting sands, where inscriptions survive from Pre-Colombian indigenes. In a brief but profoundly thoughtful documentary, Guzmán allows the cosmological and the political, the anthropological and the astronomical to intermingle and cross-pollinate rather than being artificially walled off from one another by different academic departments or different specialty television networks. A elegy for Chile's painful past but also searching meditation on the nature of time, memory and truth, Guzmán asks us to reconsider what is meant by the term 'history.' I couldn't be more encouraged to watch a documentary that so eloquently ...

i think and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the apparatus it can do such wondrous deeds for the you and for the me but what I cannot shake and what hints at things to come is that thoughts cross back in my dreams the sensations of the apparatus indulge the libido of my intellect: dark rigid cold alien i search for those lost apparitions of observation, judgment, and punishment once observed and understood the warmest bulwark for the you and for the me but now instead as the offspring of knowledge and imagination a part of a much larger system i am assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning we have recorded our smiles as we eavesdrop on our own thoughts without hearing ourselves listening we will soon have a God a real one this time and we will make it with our own hands P.S. - Some language in this poem is borrowed. The original sources are Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism by Steven Connor along with...

Cisco Pike 1972.  95 minutes. USA. Directed by Bill L. Norton. Watchdate: 9/9/2011. God I love that 70s American vintage badass style especially when it not only involves Gene Hackman and Kris Kristofferson BUT ALSO our man Harry Dean Stanton. Gene Hackman plays a narc with a secret and Kris Kristofferson plays a fallen pop idol turned drug dealer. They tangle and the result is exceedingly pleasurable and disturbing.

Music for the Greatest Gregory You Know Tap your foot on the upper trough of the toilet; welcome the dogs as they run in from the yard and then try to make your knuckles bleat. 2002 Sounds for a Young Draftee Cry out in a malthouse. Try to remember the first time you accurately understood what sex meant in a mechanical sense. If you own maracas, shake them during both these actions. If not, snap your fingers. 1967 Asphyxiation Sonata Four onlookers bury their heads in large bowls of appetizing salad while a couple discusses the terms of their impending divorce in the foreground. Waiters and stewardesses enter and exit seemingly at random. Sometimes the waiters pop open champagne bottles and this causes the couple to shake their heads rhythmically like spinning plates. Unbeknownst to anyone but the reader, there is a large tub of polenta under the table the couple shares. 1984 Hermione Spins (trans. needed) Monster trucks rev their engines vaingloriously while a small girl crawls ...